Category: Project Connect 2.0

Last fall, I made this post in which I attended a Friends Of Hyde Park briefing on Project Connect in which I took major issue with Javier Arguello defending a supposed I-35 BRT project in Minneapolis as a successful high-capacity-transit investment (it wasn’t and still isn’t actually running yet, and will suck if it ever gets built), and then using a bad sort-ofBRT project and a bad mixed-traffic streetcar project as the other two pictures, cooking the books against people considering light-rail transit in the center of an arterial roadway. Hey, here’s a picture of what I wrote last fall!

A friend of the crackplog reports that the picture below was just used yesterday, May 3, 2017, to brief City Council about the progress, showing examples of successful high-capacity transit investments.

Oh good, they’re on the MCAG and have been since last fall! Let’s check to see how they have reacted. I’m sure there’s lots of stuff they’ve written since last fall, using this board seat to good ends. I’m sure they have spoken truth to power; afflicted the comfortable; etc etc. Here, I’ve loaded up everything they have said in public about Project Connect 2.0 for your persual:

In an article in today’s Austin Monitor, the inimitable Caleb Pritchard reports that the plan to resurface the right lane in concrete is Moving Right Along. This plan is part and parcel of this other plan which has won the support of the curiously named Austinites for Urban Rail Action. Image follows.

I’m shocked, amazed, truculent, etc that it falls to me, and only me, yet again to call Capital Metro on their bullshit. Clearly they have long since decided that whatever Project Connect 2.0 spits out, it will not include rail running in the center of Guadalupe (and thus obviously Lamar as well). Otherwise, their partners at the city1 wouldn’t be doing what they are doing right now.

Where is Austinites for Urban Rail Action throughout all this?

Oh yeah. They sold you out for a seat on the MCAG, with which they apparently intend to make sure they don’t do anything to stop this.

Key things to remember in case you’re tempted to Well This Ain’t So Bad me on this:

No city has ever converted bus lanes to LRT and retained any of the original infrastructure. One city I’m aware of has sort-of converted BRT to LRT by tearing the entire thing up and starting over.

No city with half a brain would run LRT on the right side of a two-way street with lots of right turns. So this isn’t an approach to put rails in the bus lanes later anyways.

Cap Metro plans to increase ‘stations’ on the 80x this year anyways – which will be further obstacles, legitimate or merely political, for LRT on this corridor.

There is no path which ends with light rail on Guadalupe within the next couple of decades which starts with what you see above, with what AURA is supporting today. Do not be fooled.

they can’t wait three seconds without telling us how joined-at-the-hip they are these days, after all ↩

So I went to a Project Connect 2.0 presentation on Tuesday night, organized by Friends of Hyde Park. As is my wont, I also asked some pointed questions. You can get the original notes and detailed tweetstorm in yesterday’s post. Today’s is about the general things I noticed. “Javier” is Javier Arguello, “Jackie” is Jackie Nirenberg. So, here we go:

Their top ‘lesson learned’ from 2014 was: “we didn’t have long enough to convince people that the Highland/EastRiverside line was good”.

Image by Marcus Denton

(My paraphrase). I did pointedly and directly ask this question and was unsatisfied with the response. A member of the CAG has confirmed to me in private that they keep asking this question and keep getting this deeply unsatisfying response, so it is clear to me that Capital Metro will admit to no wrongdoing in Project Connect 1.0 despite the vast majority of transit activists eventually agreeing that their process was corrupt and, in the end, publicly opposing their proposal. (I interrupted at one point and reminded them how unprecedented that was – I’m not aware of any other case in the entire country where a major transit proposal was so publically opposed by such a large group of transit activists from that city).

They keep claiming nothing is decided, but it’s clearly decided in some ways.

The framework for discussion has been set in a way that heavily disfavors Guadalupe/Lamar rail. There are three ‘segments’ of travel they put up on the screen; as well as a slide which shows “previous HCT studies”. Guadalupe/Lamar is not in the top slide (most important service), nor is it listed in “previous HCT studies”. It is instead consigned to the second group, called “connector corridors”, implying that Capital Metro has already decided that it cannot be the spine of the transit network. The images they chose to prove that they are ‘mode-neutral’ are, in order, a bad modern streetcar stuck in traffic, a bad BRT system that has proved far less than advertised (Cleveland), and a bad freeway BRT proposal (Minneapolis). I directly asked Javier why they chose these images, and he claimed it was just random chance. Sure it was.

They keep claiming they’re not going to waste a ton of time on more planning, because “the plans are already on the shelves”

yet they are ignoring the 2000 light rail plan, as shown above. In fact, later in the night, Javier tried to claim we didn’t know what people would or wouldn’t support, so I asked him directly “what corridor got the most support in Project Connect 1.0”, and to his credit, he finally answered directly: “Guadalupe/Lamar”.

They really want to triple down on the Red Line.

Javier claimed at one point that reputable people believe they can get 32,000 boardings per day by making more investments in that corridor. Not actual extensions of the line, mind you. He claims that they believe they can get as many riders as a below-average light rail line by simply adding more double-tracked segments and buying more train cars. This is, of course, complete bullshit.

They really want to play up investment in freeway transit.

Bus stop on I-35. Not our I-35, Minneapolis’.

Javier talked up Mopac express lanes on numerous occasions, which are sort-of OK in my book (many riders of express buses actually pay taxes to Capital Metro, unlike the median Red Line rider). But they’re not actual transformative transit in the land use perspective, for sure. I-35 BRT is a different animal. They envision stations in the freeway corridor – and then, see the next point, they envision circulating passengers off that presumed spine with another bus trip, ignoring the fact that people with actual choices don’t typically take 2-bus rides to work every day.

They have learned that “last-mile problem” is a get out of jail free card for bad transit.

I blame every other transit advocate in Austin for continuing to enable this excuse. As I often say, if your transit provider spends a lot of time talking about their last mile problem, you have a bad transit system. No, not every location can be served without lots of transfers. But when the majority of your passengers on your theoretical ‘spine’ have to transfer, YOU HAVE A BAD SPINE, DAWG. Spines need to go down the middle and get to the good stuff. And especially on the ‘work end’ of the trip (not the ‘home end’): if a large percentage of your riders have to transfer off the spine, you’ve chosen poorly.

For Houston, the strategy meant building a light rail through the city’s primary urban corridor, where lots of people already live and work.

Cities often shy away from that approach because it’s more expensive and disruptive to lay tracks in such populated locations. But the factors that make it difficult to build light rail there were exactly the things that made it the right place to have light rail.

“Often, light rail is driven by people saying, ‘we need light rail somewhere,’ and the political process will tend to put it where it doesn’t upset anyone, where it isn’t in the way of anything,” said Spieler, who is also the head of planning for Houston-based architecture firm Morris. “That is generally not a high ridership corridor. The congested places are the places people are trying to go.”

And since transit riders are almost always pedestrians on each end of their trip, you can only expect riders to walk to destinations within a quarter mile of a station. That makes it especially important to have stations right in the center of the action, not just near it.

“If you propose transit and no one is against it, it’s a bad project,” Spieler said. “Do you build it where it’s needed, or where it’s easy? That’s the central tension in U.S. cities, and too often they make decisions based on what’s easy.”

They have also learned that “we have to fix land use” is another get out of jail free card for bad transit.

The #1, after headways were cut to 30 minutes on the best land use corridor in the city

Both Javier and Jackie asked me to keep participating and keep giving input, and Javier expressed frustration at how many times he has heard versions of “you guys lied during Project Connect 1.0, why should we trust you now”. There was also one unsubtle dig during the Q&A period. The most fun part of the night for me was when Javier tried to turn around my “so what did you learn from the 2014 election loss” question at me and asked me why the 2000 rail plan lost. I think people around me saw my eyes turn to saucers and drool start to drip from my mouth at that spicy meatball, which I of course answered with a 60-second version of this old post1.

Oh, and also: I didn’t have the presence of mind to remind them of a pretty important part of the public involvement process that one of their predecessors accomplished…

Thanks to the Friends of Hyde Park, I got presented at last night by Project Connect (2.0, now more than ever, etc etc). Here are my notes from the event, followed by a storify of the livetweets. Next post will be a next-day summary.

Soft launch

Trying to downplay urban rail component and talk up regional plan

New "focus area" 183 mopac BW

CBD defined 15 BS/R Lamar 35

3 examples of HCT are KC streetcar, Cleve BRT, shitty Minn 35 BRT

"Tired of planning", want our input from the beginning

Phased approach:

1.big ideas bold starts - Tier 1 feasibility analysis 6-9m

2.real solutions for real problems - tier 2 tech eval 14-18m

3. Path to implementation - Lpa selection 4-6m

Bragging about talking to COA, TXDOT, CTRMA

MENTIONING GL but hedging with references to city having to give ROW and "people still want to drive" clearly shaping expectations away from there already.